


The Eternal Recurrence of the Same

by theseaanemone



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Sci-Fi, Time Loop, i don't know what genre this is, if you can figure out what's going on good for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26656849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseaanemone/pseuds/theseaanemone
Summary: In which you live and die and wake again on the forest floor.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	The Eternal Recurrence of the Same

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in like twenty minutes back in February and I'm honestly not entirely sure how clear it is what's going on. Anyway, enjoy. Or be horribly confused, that works too.

The very first time, when he is truly thirteen, he wakes to starlight and an ache in his muscles. He’d been avoiding a confrontation — something with one of the teachers, maybe; it’s so long ago now he can’t remember. That’s why he’s here, pine needles digging into his skin, sprained wrist cradled to his chest. It hasn’t been bound; maybe he fell or maybe it happened in training and he stomped off in a huff before he could get it fixed. 

He used to go back to camp, those first few times. He’d seen them all die, those people who weren’t his friends back then, but sometimes they were, if he played his cards right. A careful dance, that, building himself up to something better than he was, slow enough to keep anyone from growing suspicious. It’s too late for that now: he hasn’t been thirteen in a long, long time, hundreds of years, maybe, if you added it all together. He scrubs away tears — the teenage hormones hit him hard when he lives far enough into adulthood; nowadays he’s learned to ride it out. 

In two hours, the sun will climb over the trees. The first time, he'd pried himself off the forest floor long before that, stumbled back to camp with skinned knees. The first time, he was lost nearly ’til dawn, so he’d just come into the clearing when it all got blown to hell. The first time, he cried as he bled out, hands clenched useless in the grass, gasping, face itchy with tears. He’d wanted his mother, who was... he doesn’t know what she was, anymore. That time with Emma, at the beginning, when they were still friends, he’d spoken bitter words of her. 

If he stays there much longer, they’ll all be dead. It’s a long walk in the dark, and this last time he’s lived long enough to forget all the early parts that used to be muscle memory: wake up, walk, twenty neat headshots, hide the bodies. The first time, he’d thrown up, and the second, and the third. It was sheer blind luck he wasn’t caught until the fifth time, but it’s the first time he kills himself, one night in the prison where he’s supposed to spend the rest of his life. 

People had come to see him, he can’t remember who anymore— his mother, or his father? One of the teachers, the sullen one, who he’d seen die half a hundred times. He’d live to be seventy, in the rare case nothing else killed either of them first. Why? They’d all asked it of him, those shadowy figures across the table. It’s a mash-up of all the prisons he’s seen since, on the rare occasions he thinks back on it. Sometimes he thinks there’s no life at all before that first night in the woods. 

This time, he goes to the camp. Half the kids he couldn’t name if you put a gun to his head, for all the good it would do, but some he’s fought and died by their sides. He whips around at the sound of footsteps, drops into a defensive crouch. It’s a fragile thing, this thirteen-year-old body, all the techniques in his head useless without the strength or muscle memory to back it up. He straightens, smoothes down his clothes. The sprained wrist twinges— this body doesn’t have much pain tolerance, either. 

“Where were you?” 

It’s the teacher, the sullen one. He looks young, and light, without the weight of a dead husband on him. Correcting that death is more effort than reward, for all the times he tried, and he’s not sure when he started to weigh it like that, lives planned out on the spreadsheet he carries in his mind. Emma is on there, and their children— they’d married only once, grown old together as the war waged on in the background. There’d been grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nearly, but he’d died before then, quiet in his bed. And woken beneath the stars, the child’s aches nothing compared to the old man’s. 

“Forest, sir. All quiet,” he says. 

He’d been a soldier a dozen years this last time, and most of his lifetimes before that. Suspicious thing to say, that. It’s early in the game; he might as well start again. The pistol’s still heavy in his pocket. He spins it on his finger and shoots himself in the head.


End file.
